Michelle Alexander—a civil rights litigator, legal scholar, and New York Times best-selling author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness—will speak about her observations on race and incarceration in the United States on Monday, April 20, at 7:30 p.m. in Goucher College’s Kraushaar Auditorium. Her lecture will be followed by a book signing.
Due to overwhelming demand, there are a limited number of tickets that are available only to Goucher students.
Alexander is breaking the silence about racial injustice in the U.S. legal system. In her book The New Jim Crow, she explores the cultural biases that still exist and how segregation has been replaced by mass incarceration. During her lecture at Goucher, she will examine the myths surrounding the criminal justice system from a racial and ethical standpoint and will offer solutions for combating this cycle of discrimination.
Alexander is a highly acclaimed civil rights lawyer, advocate, and legal scholar. In recent years, she has taught at a number of universities, including Stanford Law School, where she was an associate professor of law and directed the Civil Rights Clinics. In 2005, she accepted a joint appointment at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Moritz College of Law at The Ohio State University.
Also in 2005, she won a Soros Justice Fellowship, which supported the writing of The New Jim Crow, which has received rave reviews and has been featured in national radio and television media outlets. In March, the book won the 2011 NAACP Image Award for best nonfiction.
Prior to entering academia, Alexander served as the director of the Racial Justice Project for the ACLU of Northern California, where she coordinated the project’s media advocacy, grassroots organizing, coalition building, and litigation, particularly concerning educational equity and criminal justice reform. It was during those years at the ACLU that she became passionate about exposing and challenging racial bias in the U.S. criminal justice system. She launched and led a major campaign against racial profiling by law enforcement known as the “DWB Campaign,” or “Driving While Black or Brown Campaign.”
In addition to her nonprofit advocacy experience, Alexander has worked as a litigator at private law firms, specializing in plaintiff-side, class-action lawsuits alleging race and gender discrimination.
Alexander is a graduate of Stanford Law School and Vanderbilt University. Following law school, she clerked for Justice Harry A. Blackmun on the U.S. Supreme Court and for Chief Judge Abner Mikva on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
She devotes much of her time to freelance writing, public speaking, consulting with advocacy organizations committed to ending mass incarceration, and raising her three young children.
This event is being presented as the Roszel C. Thomsen Lectureship series and as part of Goucher’s theme semester titled “Civil Rights: Past/Present/Future.”